First

Day

of School
2010

Disneyland

The kids and I enjoyed one final trip to Disneyland before school started. As always, it was a lot of fun! The longest we waited in a line was for Tower of Terror, and you can see it was worth the wait!



Kaleb is finally tall enough for Indiana Jones. He was very excited, until we walked into the tunnel for the line. Then he plugged his ears, and would have closed his eyes if he wasn't worried about bumping into the walls. This is a picture of him when he thought the ceiling was going to fall on us. He survived the ride with a death grip on the steering wheel. We ended up going on the ride two more times and by the third he said it was getting easier and he didn't keep his eyes closed the whole time. I'm just glad he was willing to go.

They're kind of hard to see, but we saw Miss Piggy and Kermit the frog during the parade.

Goodbye Summer

We had a great summer. I can't believe it's over! The kids loved swim lessons, and they're all ready to move to the next class.

The last few pictures are ones my mom sent from our Utah trip that I love. Thanks Mom!

Braces be Gone, and Palomar Mountain Camping

After having braces for over a year, Emily finally got them off last week. Needless to say, she was thrilled. To celebrate, we had a party with her friend Tori, where we bought all the things she hasn't been able to have for the last year. We enjoyed milk duds, tootsie rolls, skittles, mike and ikes, whoppers, twix, and pop. It was great, and no one got sick from too much junk.

This last weekend we went camping on Palomar Mountain. It is a great place to camp. The campground was first-come, first-serve, so my friend Rachel and I left Friday morning with 4 of the kids to get a good spot. After losing one site, and thinking we would have to be in the full sun all day, we found a great site with big trees and lots of shade and plenty of room. We had friendly neighbors, which was nice, since we had 6 kids running around most of the time. On Saturday we hiked up to the observatory. It was a 2.2 mile hike, which was difficult, but even the 6 year-olds made it the whole way without needing to be carried. The observatory was huge. We didn't want to pay the $8 a person fee for the tour, so we just went and looked at the telescope through the glass. One of the docents came out and answered questions and gave us some more information about the observatory. There were pictures in the museum from the telescope, and it was pretty amazing.

Here are the kids waiting to see the telescope.

On the trail down, which was much easier.

Getting ready for the campfire.

S'mores=yummy! We were also lucky that we chose the weekend when a star-gazing club was also camping. They were very willing to let all of us look through their telescopes. We saw the crators on the moon, Venus, and lots of star clusters and nebulas, and a few shooting stars. It was a great weekend!